Help for Victims

Written by Jim Daniels

Now lets move on to help some spam victims. If you're doing business online, there is a good chance that one day you will be accused of spamming, even if you are not a spammer. The anonymity of Internet promotes attitude of accuse first and get facts later. (I know this all too well after my recent experience.)

Anyway, when it happens to you, you'll need some letters to send out to both spam victims and company responsible for spam. Here are two you should save for future reference...

Letter to spam recipients:

Thank you for contacting us. Here are details of this unfortunate situation.

The spam you received originated from domain . Rest assured you have NOT been added to any email lists at our site. We do NOT use nor do we condone use of unsolicited bulk email and we too, are innocent bystanders in this situation.

We are in no way affiliated with offending website and along with your address, our addresses were on their spam list. Any further actions you wish to take should be directed to them. More details on our policies and this incident are available at following URL:

And here's a letter you can use as a model when you need to contact party responsible for your grief...

Dear Offending Website Owner Name, CC to:legal@yourdomain.com

I have copied headers of an email message sent by your user, which confirms email activity on . This email has resulted in numerous complains to our email addresses. Please take following actions immediately:

a) explain of how this incident took place and why b) take measures to insure that this NEVER happens again c) notify each address on your list that our domain was not responsible and was an innocent bystander in this unfortunate situation

S.1618 - 105th Congress, Unsolicited Email! A Bunch of Bull!

Written by Joe Reinbold

Have you received email solicitations with this paragraph included somewhere in message:

"This message is sent in compliance with new email bill section 301. Under Bill S.1618 TITLE III passed by 105th U.S. Congress this message cannot be considered Spam as long as we include way to be removed, Paragraph (a)(c) of S.1618. Further transmissions to you by sender of this email may be stopped at no cost to you by sending a request to be removed to __"

Well it is, in plain language, a bunch of BULL!

U.S. Senate Bill 1618, an Anti-slamming Amendments Act, contained a Section 301, relating to transmissions of unsolicited commercial electronic mail. S.1618 was approved by U.S. Senate on May 12, 1998. It was then referred to House Committee on Commerce on October 21, 1998. The Bill DIED in committee and was never passed into law by 105th Congress. Nor has 106th Congress passed anything similar at this time. I was able to confirm this information both by checking U.S. Senate records and specifically by an inquiry with one of my Senators.

So first, quoted paragraph above is in error since bill never became law. Secondly, if it did become law messages I generally receive citing above, are quite deficient in compliance with alleged law that they reference. Here, in part, are exact requirements of bill that would have been law in respect to email if in fact bill had passed: